Dear researchers, students, and all the interested in building optimization algorithms,
We are happy to inform you about starting the registration on MOTOR Optimization Contest 2020 - a free open competition in developing algorithms for a real-world scheduling problem. The Contest begins right after the registration and lasts until 21 of June 2020.
Three teams with the highest scores win the Contest and get prizes from the MOTOR'2020 Organizing Committee and our partners.
To register a team of not more than three persons, fill the registration form. Please, refer to Rules.pdf and Subject.pdf to get all the additional information. Contact to Contest organizers (motor2020.contest@gmail.com) for any clarifications if needed.
1 General points
MOTOR Optimization Contest is a free open competition in developing algorithms for a real-world scheduling problem. The problem statement, input data, and auxiliary source code are provided by GTS1 Russian Research Team, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Participants are allowed to compose teams with not more than 3 members. One person may not be a member of more than one team.
2 Workflow of the contest
A participation in the Contest starts from the registration process. The list of registered teams with their current scores would be shown on the monitor during the competition. The Contest is divided into qualification, and final stage. During the qualification, the teams send solutions obtained by the algorithms developed. These solutions are evaluated in a manner that stimulates the competition by encouraging the teams to reveal their progress. On the final stage, additional test instances of regular size would be provided to finalize the scoring of the algorithms. Three teams with the highest scores become the winners of the Contest.
2.1 Registration
A team must fill the registration form. After the registration, the team is placed in the contest monitor, and a contact person from the team is invited to a Slack chat where the problem statement and organizing questions are discussed. All the details about submitting solutions would be given after the registration as well. Notice that a team can be registered at any stage of the Contest until the competition is finished.
2.2 Qualification stage
Starts on 22 of March and lasts until 7 of June. The teams submit solutions obtained by their algorithms via e-mail. Twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays, the solutions are evaluated, and the teams get leadership points. At the end of qualification, the teams get rank points for each test instance. For more details about scoring, see 3. The organizers may introduce additional instances with limited submission time during the stage.
2.3 Final stage
Lasts until 21 of June. At the final stage, the teams are provided with realworld size instances to perform fine-tuning of their algorithms. At the end of the stage, a batch of instances would be given to the teams. The submission time for solutions is tight to evaluate both the rate and the quality of algorithms. Based on the sum of scores obtained at the qualification and final stages, the teams are ranked, and the top three teams win the Contest.
3 Scoring
During the qualification stage, on Thursdays and Sundays, solutions sent by the participants are evaluated by computing the corresponding value of the optimization criteria. A team that founds a currently best solution for some instance become a leader for that instance. For each instance, a team staying a leader for that instance for several submissions in a row gets 1 leadership point for each week of leadership (two consequent submissions). There may be several leaders for an instance simultaneously. At the end of a stage, the best submissions of each team are ordered according to the value of the optimization criteria. For each instance, a team gets max(0,C −N) rank points, where C is a cost of the instance, and N is a number of teams that provided solutions better than the team’s one. On the qualification stage, C = 5 for all the instances, and, for the final stage, C = 10.